Hints and Comments on Self-Publishing

Self (critical)-publishing

You never stop learning in the self-publishing business.

I suppose we all come from different backgrounds and have different things
to learn, but learn we will  and must. And not only about the changing
technology which can make life easier and cheaper if properly applied, but also
about the old skills that those in the print trade have known since time began.
I had already self-published half a dozen books on
local history, and was about to embark on my seventh. What could I learn that
was new? Well, a great deal as it happens . . .

For one thing, I read Ann Kritzinger’s ‘Bring it to Book’ [ISBN 0-9513766-8-3
Scriptmate Editions  recommended], and learned that there are standard
sizes in paperback books, called A (180x110mm), B (198x128mm) and C (210x135mm)
sizes  not to be confused with paper sizes. Also Demy octavo (216x138mm).
Look on your bookshelf and see for yourself  Penguins tend to be the smaller
A size, with other publishers choosing between the other slightly larger standards
 and not much mainstream paperback publishing comes out in anything other
than these three sizes, all of which have the same ‘aspect-ratio’ (page length/page
width). [Since then I've started to use 234x156mm for reference-type
books  still much the same aspect-ratio]

And in particular, no mainstream publisher uses an A5 page size. I can see for
myself now that an A5 book immediately marks you as an amateur in the book trade.
It makes, as Ann says, an ugly book whereas the Penguins of this world have
a relatively slim page width which is more pleasing to the eye. Something to
do with ‘golden rectangles’ I suppose (ratio about 8:5), which the ancient Greeks
knew about when they designed the Acropolis.

So no more A5 for me, unless it’s just the programme for the local amateur
dramatic society. And no need to feel restricted any longer by that A4 printer
of mine either, because I also discovered how to 'print' to disk.

In fact I'd known for a long time how to print to disk  but I’d never
known what to do with it when I got it there. Then I discovered how, thanks
to a booklet called ‘The Antony Rowe Guide to Postscript,’ published,
not surprisingly, by Antony
Rowe Ltd (now part of CPI) of Chippenham, Wiltshire, UK. In this, their
technical man Ashley Stopforth unraveled the mysteries of why and how to use
Postscript files when transferring information to modern print machines from
your computer.

Basically, it means they can’t mess it up. So long as you use a standard Postscript
print driver on your machine when you format your document, what you see on
your screen really is what you’ll get in the finished book. No more and no less
 and no possibility of pagination changing, for example, as can sometimes
happen if you send an original document file rather than a print file. (But note problems below.)[Now
I use Adobe Acrobat, but for the same reason]

Added to this, I bought myself a flatbed scanner  so now I can input and
edit my own pictures. Expensive? Well I bought a very reasonable one
for under £300 [in 1997, it would be less now!],
and even if you include the price of a CD writer to store and transfer the large
image files, the whole lot came in at less than £500 [of
course there are other and cheaper options now, including USB memory sticks
and cheap external hard drives]. And the last time I published a book,
I'd been charged £700 by an outside agency to scan and impose my illustrations
into the text. So for less than that, I had independence for the rest of my
book-publishing career. (But note limitations
below.)

And of the five quotes I received for printing my book (On
the Trail of Flora Thompson), I was able to choose the cheapest knowing
that I wasn’t compromising on quality. It came out in 1997 Demy octavo
format size of 144 pages, including both text and over 30 monochrome illustrations,
and a 3-colour cover, at a cost price of under £1.80 per book for an average
print run of 750. (Initially I printed 500 to test the market, then another
1,000 when these were successful  which also allowed me to correct a couple
of errors on the 'reprint') [but see how Print
on Demand changes this decision process now]

Retail price £7.95 (trade price £5.50) and still selling well  I broke
even well within 6 months of publication, and a year later I was nearly £1,000
into profit. And I recovered the cost of the scanner in doing a couple of other
jobs for people in the neighbourhood.

The subject of the book? The Hampshire connections of the author of Lark
Rise to Candleford, best known for writing about her childhood in north
Oxfordshire. As an assistant postmistress at the age of 21 in Grayshott, she
wrote out telegrams for Arthur Conan Doyle and George Bernard Shaw  and
then burnt her own work in despair! I’m sure you’ll want to know more . . .
.

I discovered some limitations when producing covers using the Indigo route.

While my home scanner produces an output good enough for general illustrations
inside a book, it is not really good enough for colour covers  by which
I mean that a professionally scanned image will look so much better, the colours
deeper and the detail clearer  and in my opinion it's worth the extra
once-off cost to have this done

In order to produce cover pages 2-up on SRA3 paper off the Indigo machine
and to allow sufficient trim for the binder to operate, I had to reduce the
page height of my books from the Demy Octavo (216mm), which I had previously
adopted, to 'C' size (210mm)

I'd had no problems outputting text from MS Word as
a Postscript file for my previous three books, so I foresaw no problems looming
for my latest.

But I noticed that my bureau was now recommending using the Linotronic 330 print
driver, whereas they had previously recommended the Apple LaserWriter II NTX.
Wanting to keep up with the times,
I changed to using the Linotronic  bad move!

What happened was that the Linotronic created a slightly larger inter-word gap
than the Apple driver had done, and therefore gave me a different pagination.
What had been a 286 page book was now 292 pages. Worse, some hard page breaks
which I had inserted in good faith were now in completely the wrong place. And
I hate to think what would have been the outcome if the book had had an index
or table of contents (fortunately it didn't).

Note from the above, that you should always check that the line and page
breaks in your document remain the same when you select the final output printer
type (eg. Postscript or Acrobat) compared with any proofs you may have made
on your local printer using its own driver.

I changed to using Adobe Acrobat
instead of Postscript, but it can still give a different pagination compared
with the original Word document shown on my computer screen. Beware!

Note (in UK where there is no VAT on books): if you get your cover printed
separately, you have to pay VAT on them!

Printing & Binding Costs  Estimation of Profit:

Decided on initial print run of 500 copies, paperback. Based on sales profile
of a previous book on Flora Thompson, a total print requirement of at least
1,500 copies was likely  but an initial run of 500 followed by one of
1,000 allowed amendments/corrections to be added to the second run, and also
required less money 'up front'  with luck, the cost of the second run
would be funded largely by the profits of sales from the first

Ordered 550 covers to allow for process wastage and also give spares for
use in publicity  I actually received only 14 spare covers after losses
in production

Estimated average sales price was £6.00 per book (from previous experience)

Achieved average sales price is £5.76 per book for sale of first 250 books,
and I broke even during January 1999 (on 275 books sold)

Gave away over 50 books for publicity/gifts, so achievable profit on first
run was just over £1,000  should do better on the second (larger) run,
planned for February/March 1999. But how many to print?

Reprint of 1,000 copies arrived on 1st April 1999,
just as I had sold the last of my initial 500 copies  a success in timing
rarely achieved before!  I also took the opportunity of correcting a couple
of typos on the reprint.

Actual profit on the first 500 copies was about £800

Cost of the reprint was £1,863, thus cost per book for the first 1,500 copies is now £2.17

Average sales price on the first 500 copies was £5.73

I then published Headley's Past in Pictures
(December 1999) using much the same techniques, but this time using a non-standard
'squarer' page size (192x170mm) to accommodate both 'portrait' and 'landscape'
photographs better  initial print run was 750 which had sold out by the
end of January 2000  reprinted another 750 for future sales. Since
then I have republished this title in a POD format (2003).

Have a look at other published works to see how and where it is shown on
a book  normally outside on the back cover and inside on the publisher's
information page.

The last digit of an ISBN is a 'check digit'. If you are given a range of numbers
to use, you may have to generate this digit yourself. I have an Excel spreadsheet
which can do this for you  click here to download
(17Kb) if you need a copy of it. It also generates the
13-digit code  see below.

Barcode

Once you have an ISBN, you may choose to show it also as a Barcode.
This allows bookshops to scan the book at point of sale.
The barcode is normally placed under the ISBN on the back cover.

Note that the barcode relates to a 13-digit code, and
in 2007 this code replaced the previous 10-digit ISBN  because otherwise
we would have run out of numbers!

I had previously used a shareware program which generates a barcode image from
any ISBN  the image can then be pasted, for example into Microsoft Word,
as a picture. Then I bought Corel Ventura, which includes ISBN barcode generation
within the package.
Let me know if you need more information on any of this.

Adobe Acrobat and .PDF

Adobe Acrobat is a proprietary package which generates .pdf files for
use in the print/publication business. It cost me (September 2001) £168
excluding VAT.

It performs in a very similar way to Postscript, but has the big advantage
that the package allows you to view the final result on your own computer before
committing it to your bureau for printing. [Yes, I know
there are products such as Ghostscript which let you view Postscript output
in this way too, but .pdf files appear to be the expected standard in the industry
now, so I went for Acrobat].

It is also one of the standard file formats used for generating electronic
books  but more of that another day!

So there we were in September 2001, and I was ready to send my latest book
to Antony Rowe for printing.
Back came two quotes

The traditional method (as described in my earlier examples): £1,186
for a run of 500 books = £2.37 per copy

The new method (print on demand): £40 to set up and £1.62 per copy
printed thereafter

Dear reader  did I have to think twice?

Well, yes I did, because there were some limitations to the POD method on offer.

First, you had no choice of paper grade for the text pages (it was 90gsm),
and although it gave fairly good halftone reproduction of photographs, it wasn't
'coffee-table' quality. [There are other options now, at
an increased price  also it's also possible to put a block of colour pages
in, again at a price]

Second, the cover was not laminated  and perhaps it tended to curl slightly
more than a 'conventional' cover? (though this seems to have been less of a
problem in more recent deliveries). [As from March 2010
the covers are now laminated as standard from Antony Rowe Ltd]

But on the plus side, the cost for a full-colour cover was
the same as for a single-colour one.

And the quality of print and binding seems as good as that for my litho-produced
books.

In fact the economics of POD also allowed me to indulge myself in publishing
a book of my own short stories and other 'rhythmic writings', intriguingly titled
Never Ripe.

If you want more information on POD from Antony Rowe Ltd (now part of CPI)
, see their website. (but
see also CreateSpace below)

PS. Be aware of some of the 'hidden' costs of using POD
 annual fee to be paid per title retained on their system; high dispatch
charges for small quantities; cost of printing increases sharply if you don't
choose your page size carefully.

CreateSpace

In late 2014 I discovered CreateSpace,
a subsidiary of Amazon. It seems to fulfil most requirements of Print on Demand
at little or no cost to the author/publisher. Try for yourself and see if it
works for you.

At the moment the only problem I have with them is that they refuse to allow
text on the spine of a book less than 100 pages in extent. Don't ask me why
 Antony Rowe seem to manage it perfectly well.

About 25 years ago, when I worked for a British paper-making company, I was
asked to give my thoughts on 'the future of paper'.

At the time, they were concerned about the threat of the much-heralded 'paperless
office'  though most felt it was no more likely to arrive than the 'paperless
toilet'!

I agreed, but said in my opinion this would change radically if someone ever
came up with a truly portable reading device which was as convenient to use
as a paperback book.

I also predicted that, come the day, suppliers would virtually give away the
readers for free in order to reap the reward of selling content to the mass
market of readers.

A quarter of a century later, I think that day may soon arrive. 'Electronic
ink' and 'electronic paper' are already here (see bottom).
I believe the electronic book will catch on, not as an out-and-out replacement
to paper but as something offering an experience that paper cannot.

Let me explain.

An electronic book will be as easy and convenient to hold and read as a
paperback book, but it will also have the features of a website.

Readers will no longer need to read the whole text to find information,
they can use a search facility if they wish.

You should no longer assume that a book will be read sequentially from
cover to cover  it may contain themed sections which the reader can
access by links from 'stub' chapters or indexes. [Have a look at Wikipedia
to see how they do it]

It will also have internet connection, so these links can be to the outside
world.

A book can have colour inside at no extra cost  it can also have
video clips and sound.

For the visually impaired, it offers the option to show large print at
the touch of a button, or even become an audio book.

and I could go on, but I think you get the drift.

How do I see this challenge affecting us self-publishers?

In a number of ways  some to do with presentation and some with distribution.

Presentation:

We will have to rethink the way we write in order to make best use of the
electronic book's facilities. I do not see much future in simply transferring
your old PDF which was designed to produce a paper-based book.

In fact PDF will probably no longer be the vehicle of choice. What we will
need from our word processors or DTP systems in the future is a means of producing
seamlessly whatever the new vehicle is. It will probably be some variant of
HTML, but as authors we would prefer not to have to get involved in the technicalities
of it  after all, we never had to know how Postscript or PDFs worked.

From what I gather, it's likely that this will involve us being more careful
in allocating style codes to our words and paragraphs  they will not
only imply the visual effect as now (bold, italic, etc) but also a classification
of content (internal link, section header, etc).

Distribution:

No more paper to stock and mail.

Obviously this has advantages if we sell over the internet, but how are
we going to handle sales via bookshops? Are we to produce parallel paper versions
to cover these outlets?

These are my initial thoughts, well in advance of anything happening!

"The vision of E Ink is to create RadioPaperTM, a lightweight,
flexible display with the readability of ink on paper but with the added benefit
of digital technology to download newspaper headlines or a best-selling novel
at the user's command  providing information to anyone, anywhere."

At the end of January 2010 the Apple iPad
was released. I've been going on for a long time about electronic book readers
on my weblog so is this it at last? Well, probably
not yet, but we're getting there.